Matrox

matrox was mostly used to power business applications "signs, slotmachines, trading"

>>61285836
I owned 3 of them
Matox where known to never die but they are not nice gpu's to work with.
At the time they where much slower than the others and didn't really offer much.

so really just medocre but reliable.

>>61285836
They stopped making their own GPUs a couple of years ago and just use AMD chips now, which should tell you everything you need to know.

They were the goto brand for multimonitor support when no one else had it.

>>61285836

Not really, Matrox was never a total killer for the consumer market for gaming. They were business first and at the very least their GPUs had longevity. They did work nice for games, but not over several others.

But nonetheless, in the earliest days of discrete 3D accelerators there was more competition than now.

ATi
Nvidia
3dfx Voodoo
S3 Virge
Rendition Verite
Matrox
Intel i740
Trident TVGA
PowerVR

It was a hell of a lot healthier in the market back then, but ironically that huge variety of choices didn't help as much as you'd think because before the growth of standard APIs like DirectX and OpenGL, games would be coded to use specific 3D Accelerators, usually only 1 but sometimes a couple at most. So you couldn't just pick any of them based on price/performance because it was entirely up to the game devs to actually support them.

So you might go buy the amazing Rendition Verite V1000 only to have Quake and Tomb Raider actually use it, while Mech Warrior and several of your other favourite games don't and are stuck on software rendering.

Then around 2001 or 2002 the competition just started dropping like flies while ATi took on the Radeon moniker while Nvidia took on the GeForce and that was it, the market was 2.

>>61285836
They had no competitors for 3D Linux support, for about 10 years if someone did 3D Linux at the consumer level, only Matrox. Partly because of this they were also defacto the reference for OpenGL implementation. Everything else was binaries or encumbered. The drivers were very good - polished open source code, although not cutting edge.

The Milennium G200 was the fastest 2D card when it came around. The G400 was special in that it supported multiple displays, it had two VGA ports. Then Parhelia got stuck in development hell, now they license stuff from AMD to build novelty cards for special purposes.

>>61286944
the 3dfx banshee had much faster 2d performance

>>61285836
vintage3d.org
http://vintage3d.org/mga1.php

at the time, they did multihead setups better than anyone else, that was the only thing they had over competitors, their 3d was weak

>>61285836
Matrox's claim to fame was best in class 2D cards in the early to mid '90s, which mostly meant:
> enough VRAM for 24b at high resolutions
> high bandwidth, high quality RAMDACs to make CRTs look their best
> decent 2D blitting processing

They never really made the leap to competitive 3D, and the rest is history.

How do companies like that still stay a float?

>>61287237
matrox gpus are very common on server mainboards for remote access (HP ILO).

File: trap218.png (84KB, 288x272px) Image search: [Google]

84KB, 288x272px

>>61285836

Matrox had legendary good picture quality. Lots of artists picked them for 2D work (remember, this was the end of CRT era, good RAMDAC and high refresh rate was a must).

I still have some Millenniums, also a Rainbow Runner somewhere deep in my collection.

>>61287030
>they did multihead setups better than anyone else, that was the only thing they had over competitors
this
basically the most reliable way to drive mulitmonitor back in the day

>>61287237

VIA are still selling x86 cpus for example - though they are mostly backed by the chinese these days.

>>61287459

VIAs license is basically worth the companies weight in gold. They're one of only 3.

I used one with a Thinkpad docking station that had the card slot to output from my T42 to five 20" 4:3 monitors back in the day (like 10 years ago). Great extended desktop for the static web pages of the era/low refresh rate content (like radar). However, this was also the start of the streaming video era, and playing any sort of video on it was a slideshow.

>>61287510

There is one dude - possibly on andtech's forums or OCN (I forget) who posts videos of gaming on the latest and greatest VIA cpus. Naturally they don't hold a candle to anything AMD or Intel make but it is quite interesting to see guven the staggering technological lead AMD and Intel have over VIA.

>>61285836
i had a dual screen matrox like 9 years ago. For some reason the picture slowly vibrated up and down... Never sen it before, havent seen it after...

>>61285836
matrox became king of broadcast video I/O when the amiga platform went EOL

they crawled into a shrinking niche, and then starved to death

>>61285836
My school has a really old computer running Win NT with a matrox card in it, it's plugged into a sony PVM via BNC, pretty neat

>>61285836
Matrox were pretty shit. Like others said, they mostly had multi-monitor and slightly superior image quality going for them, but that advantage disappeared quickly.

Now, Kyro cards, on the other hand, were the shit when they first came out. Too bad they couldn't keep up with ATI and Nvidia's advancements and kept rebranding their GPU over and over until they went bankrupt.

Kind of what AMD are doing now.

>>61288482

kind of what nvidia did a few years ago, but maybe you were not born yet

>>61288519
Except when Nvidia did it people still bought theis GPUs because their driver support has always been top notch and at least five levels above all the competitors.

ATI / early AMD cards used to have shit drivers.
Kyro cards used to have shit drivers too.
Nvidia always kept on top of things with their drivers and they never had any weird bugs or compatibility issues.

I'd still like to see Kyro make a comeback or some other company enter the GPU market. The memes are getting stale.

Did it make any difference if you combined a Matrox card with 3dfx accelerator card from combining with other base cards?

>>61288744
nope. it didn't matter what kind of turd you had for a 2D card, the 3dfx did all the lifting in glide games.

in high res 2D (remember, 1600x1200 75hz was like DUDE WHOA) the 3dfx's VGA link cable would fuck your shit up with analog interference, so a matrox board couldn't show off it's top tier signal quality.

that really sucks

>>61288975

>3dfx did all the lifting in glide games.

I do find it somewhat amusing that on modern software and hardware glide supporting games tend to be easier to run because of wrappers whereas the DX options (or even software rendering) these old games had are flatout broken.

>tfw my first gpu was a matrox millenium g400

i dont even remember if i gaymed with it

>>61287510
Doesn't VIA have very high instructions per cycle?

Also can be used for gayming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z70UgT80gd0

>>61286052
ye but voodoo had some good shit back in the day

Does anyone have an screenshots of 2D with matrox to compare with other old gpus?!

>>61289495
haha no.
this shitflinging contest is from 20+ years ago and the quality difference was on the analog output.
so if you did find evidence you'd be looking at film-camera photographs of a CRT.

>>61285836
I have 6 1080p displays as my main daytrading setup. I use Matrox card because it's by far the best and most reliable of the bunch I tried.